CHANDIGARH: “Brides for votes”—the flippant, even absurd, phrase captures the unsettling intersection of electoral politics and a demographic crisis decades in the making in Haryana.
At a rally in Rewari, BJP MLA Bimla Chaudhary from Pataudi promised unmarried men that if the BJP won the municipal elections, she would help arrange their marriages —a remark that drew laughter from the crowd but also renewed attention on the state’s history of gender imbalance and the increasingly normalised language surrounding it.
At a gathering in support of BJP municipal council candidate Vinita Pippal, Chaudhary said: “My mothers and sisters, vote to make Vinita win and let me make one more promise from this stage today—the responsibility of getting young bachelors sitting around married, that too is mine. Just give us your blessings.”
The comment quickly became the defining moment of the rally. Haryana Health Minister Arti Rao, daughter of Union Minister and Gurugram MP Rao Inderjit Singh, was sharing the stage with Chaudhary and joined in the moment, joking that the MLA had effectively opened a “marriage bureau” in Rewari and would surely keep her word. The audience laughed. So did the leaders on stage.
But beneath the humour lay a reality far more uncomfortable than the exchange suggested. In several districts of southern Haryana, including Rewari, Mahendragarh, Jhajjar and parts of Gurugram, decades of female foeticide and gender discrimination have produced skewed sex ratios, shrinking the pool of eligible women and reshaping marriage patterns across rural communities.
Later, Chaudhary said she had already helped arrange marriages for several unmarried men from Rewari and nearby areas with women from Palwal and adjoining districts.
“I am a daughter of Palwal. I have arranged marriages for young men from Rewari, Rampura, and Bijlighar, most of them are married around Palwal. First vote, then get your marriage arranged,” she said.
879 women for every 1,000 men: Census 2011
The 2011 Census said Haryana had only 879 women for every 1,000 men. The child sex ratio in the 0–6 age group was even lower at 834 girls per 1,000 boys, reflecting the scale of sex-selective abortion practiced over decades.